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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
9
The Dominance of Beethoven in the Musical World Grows Stronger as Time
Goes On, and the Player-Piano Offers the Student An Excellent Medium
Through Which the Beauties of This Great Composer's Work May Be Revealed
It is a fact not always realized that the taste
of the American people in musical art—at least
the taste of such portion of this people as in-
terests itself in music—is extremely conserva-
tive. The passion for modernism which has
filled musical Europe for ten years past, and
which even the war has not wholly submerged,
found little encouragement in this country. The
steadily increasing number of Americans who
go to symphony concerts and instrumental re-
citals seem to want, with a persistency never
failing, constant draughts from the classical
fountain.
The works of Bach, Beethoven,
Mozart and Mendelssohn continue to keep their
place, constantly accompanied, on concert pro-
grams, by the name of Wagner, and in the reper-
toire of pianists by that of Chopin. American
taste, in a word, likes that which it knows to
be thoroughly well tried and proved. It has
no desire to make reckless excursions into
tonal realms unexplored. Ornstein amuses or
irritates, Scriabine's association of color with
sound is rudely referred to as "fireworks." Yet
Beethoven's C minor symphony, after one hun-
dred and twelve years, continues to draw a
crowd.
The Boston Verdict
These reflections are prompted in part by
observing the program for the opening concert
of this season given by the Boston Symphony
Orchestra. It is probably as true to-day as
ever that the Boston symphony audiences rep-
resent the highest average level of American
musical culture. Why this persistent clinging
to the classical name of Beethoven?
Apart from any speculations as to the influ-
ence of classical German thought upon Ameri-
can artistic taste, we are certainly able to see
clearly certain elements in the amazing per-
sistency with which Beethoven maintains his
hold upon our people. It is equally certain that
one at least of these elements lies in the tre-
mendous moral strength of the man, a moral
strength which essentially fits in with the Ameri-
can conception of life, and which is wholly char-
acteristic of the classical masters in music!
Bach and Beethoven—the Old and the New
Testament in music. So Robert Schumann de-
scribed them; and so they may most rightly
be expected to appeal to a nation which, like
the American, is founded, in spite of modern
frivolities, upon a true, if somewhat narrow,
religious basis.
We Americans ought to be glad that we love
Beethoven, and we ought to be equally glad that
his Moonlight Sonata, so-called, is one of the
hundred best sellers among music rolls.
But a musician who, after more than a cen-
tury, can still wake such profoundly responsive
chords within us, and whose work is still uni-
versally regarded as the most perfect flowering
of pure classical thought in music, deserves our
reverent attention. A few remarks on the man
and his music are therefore offered at this
time, with the hope that perhaps they may stim-
ulate some of the music lovers who read these
pages, and whose music is attained by means
of the player-piano.
The Classical Road
In all stages of human thought there exists a
process of what may be called "formalization,"
constantly working itself out towards a climax
of perfection. When the human 'mind, in its
unceasing search for truth, lights upon some
more or less definite path of progress, it fol-
lows this up, along lines of least resistance, until
it has contrived a broad, well-made, systematic-
ally directed road, which apparently leads on
forever in the same easy way. In every art the
process of bringing the scattered thoughts of
pioneer thinkers into a condition of system,
where a definite form, expressing all the accepted
ideas about that art, may be set up for cultiva-
tion and imitation, is a process almost uniform
in manner and quite uniform in end. But it
always happens that at the moment when for-
mal perfection has been reached some bold soul
insists once more on striking for the goal along
some short-cut through the tangled jungle of
individual temperament, and, disdaining the easy
broad road of classicism, plunges daringly, with
a few devoted followers, into the task he has
set for himself, the task of reaching the goal of
truth unhindered by the trammels of conven-
tion.
Every art—painting, poetry, music—goes
through this process. But the classic road re-
mains always, to afford a broad and steady path
for the feet of the inexperienced traveler, and
a standard of measurement from which all in-
dividual divagations may be viewed, and their
worth estimated.
The Man
Ludwig van Beethoven, born 1770, died 1827,
stood at an era of the world's progress which"
saw the extinction of the ancient systems of so-
cial economy and tire beginning of the modern
world which we know and understand. It is a
definite fact that all which happened before
1789 seems as if it happened many centuries
ago when the world was young; whilst all that
has happened since, say, 1815, might have hap-
pened yesterday. The intervening quarter-cen-
tury saw the French Revolution and the begin-
ning of modern industrial life. It saw the end
of all pretense (outside Prussia at any rate)
concerning the divine right of kings. It saw
the beginning of modern industry, modern so-
cial economy, the modern conquest of nature,
the modern theory of democracy. It was a
wonderful period.
Through it all, the plain square figure of
Beethoven, that short thick-set body with the
huge head, the flashing eyes and the beetling
brows, stood, as it were, on a mountain aloft,
proudly seeing all, and anon pouring forth in
deathless song his wondrous thoughts of the
world shaping itself around him. For Beethoven
was a republican by choice and conviction. His
music is the music of a free spirit, of a man
who loved freedom, and loved the God of Free-
dom, who was wholly above mercenary consid-
erations, who wrote, music because he could nof
otherwise express the beauty that rose up in
his soul; who, in a word, was the prophet of a
new generation and a new economy.
The Last Classic
Beethoven, however, is, to musicians, wonder-
ful for another reason. He it was who laid
the last firm courses on the great road of clas-
sic perfection; but he it was also who was the
first to leave his almost perfect work and plunge
boldly into the unknown, content to achieve
neither wealth nor comfort if he could but pro-
ceed more quickly towards a clear view of that
vision of truth which from the easy highway
which he himself had labored to perfect seemed
too distant. Beethoven was the last and great-
est master of classic music, the first of that
romantic school which brought forth Schu-
mann, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Wagner and the
moderns.
Servile Music
Thus he is bound to us moderns by yet an-
other link. The music of Mozart and Haydn,
lovely as it is, nevertheless smells too de-
cidedly of the ancien regime, of Versailles and
the Grand Trianon, of the pompous frivolities
on which the sometime free spirit of Goethe
seemed to flourish at the Grand Ducal Court
of Weimar. The musician who had to bow be^
neath the incredible insolence and meanness of
the Archbishop of Salzburg, his elder brother
in the art, who lived his long life as the paid
servant of an Austrian feudal landowner; these
men no longer go straight to our hearts as
Beethoven does. They belong to the old age;
he is still a modern. Nor is there much chance
that the world will ever think him ancient,
though he may not always be in the mode,
for, we repeat, Beethoven is a free spirit, and
belongs to the modern world by right.
To the beginner in musical appreciation who
wishes to study the work of Beethoven through
the medium of the player-piano, some general
hints may be given; hints wholly different in
spirit and in purpose from any that would be
offered to the ordinary piano student. For the
player-pianist, be it remembered, has the in-
estimable privilege of going straight to the
core of the works he plays. Technical details
are not for him. He can deal with the master's
thought direct and be filled with the master's
spirit to the utmost of his capacity.
To the beginning- player-pianist, then, we
{Continued on page 10)
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